On and around May Day, in Chicago, this conference/event will serve as a reconstitution and rearticulation of an initial conference/event held in 2008 at the ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany. A final conference/event will take place at the Getty Center, Los Angeles in 2010. http://www.ourliteralspeed.com

OUR LITERAL SPEED manifests the imperatives that materialize the theoretical and the pedagogical. No longer can we interpret forms of academic and artistic professionalism as neutral, abstract backgrounds to the aesthetic and performative. These activities have produced their own distinctive surfaces and procedures: the “aesthetic” has become discursive and “discourse” has become aesthetic.

Rather than a series of academic lectures, the conference/event is imagined as a kind of “media pop opera” or “administrative gesamtkunstwerk” that includes fluid and/or jagged transitions among scholarly presentations, panel discussions, artist’s talks, performances, and an art exhibition within an academic conference. These emerging, hybrid forms demand a synthesis of collective activity (OUR), a self-reflexive examination of art history and its constitutive technologies (LITERAL), and an intense concern for the pace and texture of our movement through institutional mediation (SPEED). The project offers a temporary laboratory in which a concerned public can investigate non-formulaic, experientially vibrant and theoretically precise responses to the modes of distribution, consumption, and circulation that drive contemporary art.